USA TODAY is reporting that four Senate Democrats refused to block a Republican data center bill, breaking with party leadership on an issue that is shaping the campaign trail ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. It said the vote came in one of the Senate's last actions before departing Washington until November.
The bill, called the Ratepayer Protection Act, previously passed the House of Representatives 417-3. It would require state utility regulators to consider rules for data centers to recover the full, incremental cost of the power they need to operate. USA TODAY said most Democrats opposed the legislation, which they described as "toothless," while Republicans argued it would help shield Americans from spiking energy costs tied to AI data centers.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said party leadership decided to prevent the bill from advancing because it did not go far enough. He said Democrats want to make it mandatory for data centers to fully shoulder their own power upgrades by law, not by suggestion or hope or whim. USA TODAY said the four Democrats who tried unsuccessfully to move the bill forward were Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. Ossoff, who is in a competitive Senate race in battleground Georgia, told USA TODAY he thought the legislation was worthy of debate.
Separately, USA TODAY is reporting that U.S. military forces departed the Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq, ending a two-decade American presence at a time when the U.S. war against Iran has created significant regional instability and emboldened the country's Iran-backed militias. It said the closure marks the second U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.
USA TODAY also reported that election officials in some of the largest counties nationwide say the federal database for checking citizenship will not have a big impact on the midterm elections, because a Supreme Court decision restoring state access to it came too close to Election Day. It said the Trump administration is using Homeland Security money to air pro-Trump ads on TV before the midterms, according to documents and lawmakers.